The Designer’s Geoengineering Toolkit: Crisis Creates Opportunities for Landscape Architects to Reverse, Repair and Regenerate the Earth’s Climate

Currently, education of landscape architects to address the climate crisis (CC) and its impacts emphasize resiliency (the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties) and adaptation (coping with impacts of CC). We explore and advocate for mitigation which goes to the root cause of CC. This approach reveals that the profession of landscape architecture is uniquely situated to play a significant role in climate change mitigation, and climate repair. Scientific experts agree that lowering emissions and transitioning out of fossil fuel consumption will not be enough. Special Report Global Warming 1.5℃ (IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2019): Other actions are needed to lower carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere that have already ‘baked-in’ global warming consequences. “Decarbonizing” solutions are directly relevant to the profession of landscape architecture. Many recognized methods are land-based initiatives which can aid in the drawdown of anthropogenically induced atmospheric carbon dioxide greenhouse gas accumulations. We discuss such methods within the context of geoengineering (GE) and examine a spectrum of such remedies, as tools, with exemplary projects to demonstrate how they are being employed by landscape architects. Many of these tools involve natural and biological systems deployed at various scales of application that require relatively long timescales to make important contributions towards mitigation. Therefore, advanced techno-scientific GE tools are also discussed as we look at strategies that may be needed in the shorter term to avert catastrophic impacts, should this become necessary, when combined with mitigation and emission reductions.